Thoughts on raid 0 for sata ssds

[iameatingjam]

When my motherboard only had two m.2 slots that were both occupied and I had a 1tb mx500. I saw that the mx500 went onsale (only $50 for another 1TB) I bought it and put it in raid 0 with the old one. I was afraid it might not work since there were several years between them, but it did work and quite well. I just did it through windows.

Now I use this drive for steam games and as my downloads folder, so anything from a browser or qbittorent, goes in there. The benefit? Its very fast, especially when having to move files around or when installing something. Some say raid 0 reduces random r/w but that doesn't appear to be the case here, at least according to my benchmarks. And of course everything that I can't afford to lose, goes somewhere else. Even after changing systems (cpu, motherboard, new windows installation, everything) the drives still stayed together. All I had to do was assign it a drive letter and it worked.

But it seems like so many people are against doing this. Why? Is it just because of potential data loss? I've been nothing but impressed at how fast it is for the value. Sure it probably makes more sense to get a quality m.2, but if those slots are all occupied I find this works quite well.

Thoughts? Any other reason not to do this, other than potential data loss?

 

[Kapone33]

I have had a 4TB RAID 0 array with 2 MX500s for the last 3 years. You are Golden. If you notice when you move files there will be no slowdown like with NVME and it runs cooler as well.

 

[unwind-protect]

Raid0 rocks.

The only "hole" in your scheme is modded games. When you apply manual labor to mod a game in your Steam collection you want to protect the investment. You can either back up those games selectively, or you can open another Steam library folder on a different drive / drive array.

 

[iameatingjam]

Raid0 rocks.

The only "hole" in your scheme is modded games. When you apply manual labor to mod a game in your Steam collection you want to protect the investment. You can either back up those games selectively, or you can open another Steam library folder on a different drive / drive array.

Interesting, didn't think about that. Actually I didn't even know mods didn't back up. Only recall modding a game once through steam. But yeah I have steam libraries on every drive. Usually the older games I think that will benefit less from m.2 speed go on that one. Though I know the difference between 1000MBs and 6000MBs still isn't much for playing games, unless its Forspoken, lol.

 

[Kapone33]

Interesting, didn't think about that. Actually I didn't even know mods didn't back up. Only recall modding a game once through steam. But yeah I have steam libraries on every drive. Usually the older games I think that will benefit less from m.2 speed go on that one. Though I know the difference between 1000MBs and 6000MBs still isn't much for playing games, unless its Forspoken, lol.

Actually i have found that Total War Warhammer also repsonds to the storage used.

 

[iameatingjam]

Actually i have found that Total War Warhammer also repsonds to the storage used.

Really? Like it will actually give you higher fps?

 

[freeagent]

The last time I ran Raid 0 on SSD was with 3rd gen Intel..

I did notice CPU usage was much higher when the drives were active. I am not sure how that would translate on a modern system though..

 

[Kapone33]

Really? Like it will actually give you higher fps?

Faster turn times.

 

[OolongGoat]

I had a 4x Patriot Inferno RAID array a long time ago. They were 60GB drives. Incredibly fast and a good experiment with RAID since I hadn't doing it before.

Always used the MB RAID and not a dedicated RAID card. I did notice with RAID 0 with some mechanical drives there was increased latency, but once the drives got going, it was fast.